


didn't mention us, not even once

by madeverymerry



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen, Late Night Writing, M/M, sort of a character study but also sort of not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 04:16:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/935220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madeverymerry/pseuds/madeverymerry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the mirrors in his apartment have been pried off of the wall and placed neatly in a closet, inside a safe, inside another closet, padlocked three times and glued shut around the edges of the door. Cecil confided to Carlos that he takes them out and puts them back up when it’s time for inspection, but always tries to be at work on those days. Just in case.</p>
            </blockquote>





	didn't mention us, not even once

**Author's Note:**

> This is the second time I've written for Night Vale, and most of it was written at 1 in the morning when I was running off of extremely caffeinated tea.
> 
> I just have a lot of Cecil feelings. Half-character study? Maybe.

“Carlos,” Cecil says one morning. Carlos knows it’s Cecil, because he’s sitting at the edge of Cecil’s bed with his sleepy head in his stiff hands, and because only Cecil still says his name like there’s an adjective in front of it— _brave_ Carlos, _ingenious_ Carlos, _perfect_ Carlos.

“Carlos,” Cecil says, and pauses.

Night Vale time works differently, and sometimes not at all, but this is one of the days where the sun is rising more or less at the right time. Carlos stares, dazed, down at his feet, and watches the stripes of sunlight crawl down his knees.

_Cecil says, and pauses._

Carlos looks up.

Cecil is not as composed in reality as he is on the air. He works better with notes in front of him and a nebulous other to speak to; their conversations used to consist of traded _um_ s and _er_ s and _well_ s. It’s not a surprise, exactly, when he just says _Carlos_ and then he stops.

But he doesn’t fluster, not really. Even in the most awkward of moments he would return those _um_ s and _well_ s smiling, cheerful. Sure of his next word even if it was only a nonsense filler language.

Here in the early morning crawling-light, Cecil sits on the edge of his bed with his long knotty fingers twisted up in each other like anxious spiders, his eyes downcast and shoulders hunched. As Carlos watches, still blurry with sleep and the glasses left off of his face, Cecil darts a hunted purple glance at him, and down again, away.

“What?” Carlos says.

Maybe it’s brusquer than he meant it to be, or Cecil is just _really_ on edge—because Cecil actually _jumps,_ which Carlos has never seen before in real life, jumps like someone’s just dropped a hot iron into his lap and lets out a piercing nervous laugh.

“It’s nothing,” he says at once, and Carlos knows that it isn’t. Cecil has held himself together through intangible earthquakes and packs of feral plastic bags. He’s pranced down subway stairs to almost certain damnation and come out pretty all right, really, and opened a window to report the exact consistency of the peculiar bluish substance currently sliding down the recording studio roof—interestingly, the same color and texture of Carlos’ least favorite Jell-O.

Cecil has, in other words, remained totally serene in the direst of situations. But here he is, the morning light painting tiger-stripes on his furry bare calves, his knuckly spider-hands all twined up together and eyes slanted away from Carlos.

He’s still so tired. Carlos wipes his hand over his face, scrubbing his palm across his eyelids, feeling how long his bangs have gotten and how he should maybe, really, get his hair cut again. There’s a fragment of a song scratching at his brain; not any of the ones Cecil plays for the weather segment, but one he heard outside of Night Vale. Before. It’s got piano backing, but the empty silence of forgotten lyrics is a dull ache on the inside of his skull.

“What time is it?” An automatic question, one he meant to come out differently. His voice sounds blurry, like he’s talking through water. Cecil straightens up.

“Time to leave soon,” he says, cheerily, and bounds up off of the mattress. He’s about to leave the room when Carlos’ hand flashes forward to wrap around his wrist.

“What _is it,_ ” he repeats, a little clearer. The pattern of the blinds is puddling golden around his ankles. “What’s the problem, Cecil, is what I mean.”

Cecil looks affronted. “Well, nothing’s the problem, Carlos,” he says, and the _perfect_ is only a shadow away from said. “But, if you think about it, _everything’s_ the problem. We’re tiny, mostly imperfect beings hurtling through the void at over five hundred thousand miles an hour, destination unknown, and yet we persist in doing all these terrible things, like murder and arson and _double-parking_ and—”

Time is irrelevant in Night Vale, but it’s too early for this—randomized philosophizing. _Save it for the show,_ Carlos wants to say, and for a reckless half-second he actually thinks about saying it. Watching Cecil’s pointed face crumple tight into something sharper. He wonders if Cecil would react like that, wonders if anyone in Night Vale reacts in the real to the things that they should.

But he doesn’t say that, because the world _is_ hurtling through the void at over five hundred thousand miles an hour and because Cecil’s hand has slipped up to catch gentle hold of his fingers.

“Cecil,” he interrupts. “That’s all true. What’s the problem, right now, with you?”

That’s as eloquent as he gets this early in the morning. However early it is in the morning. The tiger-stripes have slipped down onto the plush white carpet on Cecil’s bedroom floor, rather faster than they should have, so the sun is definitely not sticking to schedule today. Carlos marvels for a moment at how little fright this thought causes; half a year ago he called Cecil in a panic because he could only find furry gray gum in his clocks.

Now the sun is busily sliding up the sky like it’s late for an appointment and that doesn’t make him frightened at all, only a little annoyed. Cecil is looking down at him with an expression that’s two parts fond and two parts sad and maybe a part or two condescending. That looks says _you know so little about the world, my dear,_ but Carlos doesn’t hold him against it, not really.

“Come on,” Carlos says.

The mattress squeaks as Cecil sits back down, and the springs make a warning groan when he scoots over to rest his bare thigh against Carlos’.

Cecil’s body startled and confused Carlos for the longest time. His calves are as hairy as those of any bear, but his thighs are pale and hairless; the first time Cecil crawled into bed beside him, Carlos wondered why he was wearing legwarmers. His joints are too knobby, his hands and feet too long, like someone got distracted when they were making them and pulled them a little too much. His tattoos are all miscellaneous symbols and hooking thorny tendrils snaking in between them, and Carlos sometimes wonders if a symbol has changed since he saw it the day before.

Cecil doesn’t have a navel, either, just a smooth expanse of belly and a tiny dip. Lost it in an accident, he explained to Carlos, once he’d managed to coax him out of the barricaded shower. The same one that got him the tiny puckered scar on his forehead.

Cecil’s hands aren’t as strange as the rest of him. The palms are smooth, but they still have all the appropriate lines. Carlos turns Cecil’s hand over in his, tracing his fingertips absently over the thick soft part of the thumb.

“Sorry,” he says. “Not really awake yet. What’s going on?” A terrible thought occurs to him. “There’s no horrific side effects from the sky gelatin last week, is there?”

Cecil laughs again, but it’s more of his radio laugh and less of a squirrelly giggle. More natural, in other words. He curls his fingers over Carlos’. “No. Not since the last couple of tentacles fell off.”

“Good.” Silence, but companionable. The thinning stripes of light crawl closer to the window. “So what is it, then?”

Cecil sighs, rests his head on Carlos’ shoulder. “You’ll laugh.” His voice is deeper and darker. A well in the woods. “It’s really very silly.”

Carlos has never laughed at Cecil, unless he tries to be funny, and sometimes not even then. “I won’t.”

Cecil’s smooth and anxious spider-hands tighten around Carlos’ fingers, and he shifts, tilting his head to look up at Carlos—his weird, lilac look, the one that makes Carlos want to simultaneously kiss him and jump totally out of his skin just so he can escape that slyly naïve, half-knowing purple stare.

“What do I look like?” Cecil asks.

Whatever it was that Carlos was expecting, it wasn’t that, and he almost— _almost_ blurts out a laugh out of sheer surprise. The expression on Cecil’s face, though, is his purple look and a childlike nervousness all at once, and grounds Carlos enough to restrain that laugh.

But Cecil maybe sees something in his face, because the purple shutters away entirely and that naïve vulnerability washes over his features entirely. His mouth puckers in, sharp arrowheads forming at the corners.

“Never mind,” he says. “I told you it was a silly question.”

Cecil makes to get up again, but Carlos is awake now—really awake, awake enough to realize that the blind pattern has slowed in its pace across the floor and enough to feel Cecil’s pulse underneath his thumb. He wraps his arm around Cecil’s waist and draws him to him, pulls him back onto the bed until they’re sprawled belly-up on the lavender sheets.

It’s not _really_ a silly question. Carlos knows about his problem with mirrors; his coworkers record the radio broadcasts he misses out on, and he listens to them later with his bedside lamp on and a crossword puzzle balanced on his knees. _As my mother used to tell me_ always gets Carlos’ attention, just because he knows so _little_ about Cecil, and he was a little disappointed to realize that it was just a vague and menacing death prophecy.

Not vague to Cecil, though. All the mirrors in his apartment have been pried off of the wall and placed neatly in a closet, inside a safe, inside another closet, padlocked three times and glued shut around the edges of the door. Cecil confided to Carlos that he takes them out and puts them back up when it’s time for inspection, but always tries to be at work on those days. _Just in case._

Even the mirrors in Carlos’ lab have all been covered up. One by one, when Cecil flinched away from them without even looking, Carlos has tucked dark sheets over each mirror, and doesn’t miss the relief in Cecil’s eyes when he comes in the next time.

Now, lying back on Cecil’s bed with his arm around Cecil’s shoulder, Carlos doesn’t feel like laughing.

“What do you look like,” he muses. Cecil tenses, as if to get up again, but Carlos pulls him tighter against his side, and Cecil gives up with a grumbling sort of sigh. The golden morning light is starting to turn paler and brighter, and really they should be getting up and getting ready to go to their respective workplaces, but Cecil’s nose is pressed into the hollow spot between Carlos’ collarbone and ribcage and his eyelashes are brushing against Carlos’ skin whenever he blinks.

“Your eyes are purple,” is the first thing he thinks to say. “Did you know that?”

At his side he hears a snort. “Everyone’s eyes are purple. I kind of figured.”

“Mine aren’t,” Carlos points out.

“You’re not from Night Vale.”

Carlos turns to look down at Cecil, and sees him staring up at him. There’s a shadow of that questing purple look, but otherwise it’s all innocence and vulnerability. He feels a sudden dropping sensation in his stomach. The subway and the pyramids and the disappearance of all his interns did not wound Cecil, didn’t even scratch him, but if Carlos says the wrong thing he’ll wreck everything Cecil is.

It unsettles him to be so powerful.

“You’ve got a scar on your forehead,” he says. “You know that already. You said you’d tell me how you got it someday.”

“I will.”

Carlos’ hand moves, to run the tip of his thumb across Cecil’s eyebrows. “Your ears are a little pointy. The left one has a freckle on it, just on the top.” He’s stared at those ears on the rare occasions Cecil was occupied with something else in his presence. “Your eyebrows are… expressive. You have long eyelashes. They’re light. Your nose is… impressive.” It’s not the first thing Carlos noticed about him, that was the violet eyes, but it was certainly the second. “You’ve got a freckle there, too.”

He touches the tip of his index finger to it, a brown dot in the hollow of Cecil’s right eye socket. Those long, pale eyelashes flutter, brush his skin with the lightest of touches. A butterfly kiss.

“ _Teeth like a military cemetery_ ,” Carlos quotes, just to see him laugh. Cecil chuckles indulgently and reaches up, rests his hand at the hollow of Carlos’ throat.

“Your eyes are purple,” Carlos repeats. He turns his head, tracks the shadows of passing birds, or helicopters, or figments of his imagination, as they hurry across the ceiling. Cecil’s breathing is light and even, tickling the bare skin of his ribcage.

“You know the color of wet pavement,” Carlos says impulsively, “after it rains, when the sun is almost done going down and there’s a fluorescent light bulb shining out from the neighbor’s porch and reflecting on the water that’s still left? It’s not quite purple but it’s not really any other color, either. It’s kind of like the color of lightning. Or the color of the first stars you see at twilight.”

Or the color of backlit clouds in the first grey hours of the morning, or the color of someone’s smiling teeth in the light spilling out from a cheap barbecue joint.

“That’s the color,” Carlos finishes lamely. He’s not given to bursts of poetry. Not his personality type. He could have said _light purple_ or _lilac_ or even _African violet,_ he even knows the hex code from some silly computer programming class back in high school, but instead he had to go on about _lightning_ and _fluorescent light bulbs_ —

Cecil, at his side. Stirring and hooking his knee through Carlos’, moving his hand down to cup it over Carlos’ chest.

Carlos lays his hand over Cecil’s.

They stay like that for a few minutes, as the sun hurries upward. Carlos supposes his coworkers will be just as dismayed and confused by the swift sunrise. They might even manage to miss the opportunity to poke fun at him when he comes in late.

Cecil says finally, “I thought so.”

Carlos’ throat feels rusty and warm, like he’s been eating hot metal. “You’re rubbing off on me.”

There’s a throaty little laugh that huffs warmly humid onto his side, and Cecil sits up. The tension from before is gone; now he’s all languid confident movement and a wry half-smile, a crooked look slanted diagonally to Carlos’ face. “I hope so,” he intones, in his radio voice. His Voice of Night Vale voice. Then it drops upward, resumes normality, and he’s Cecil again.

“Thank you,” he says sincerely. All of the dazing purple look is gone, and he’s just Cecil. Freckled in two places he can’t see and more that he can, looking at Carlos speculatively. Carlos can’t decide what he’s trying to figure out, and when Cecil stands up and pulls up the blinds, letting the now fully-morning light spill into the room, he decides it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Cecil is half mystery, half horror story, half absurd science fiction. He shouldn’t be three halves, no one should, but somehow he manages. He’s got footnotes written in languages Carlos doesn’t understand and won’t ever be able to learn, has handwritten addendums and scratch-outs and chapters all flipped back-to-front. Carlos sits in the cooling morning light, watching him sort through his wardrobe in search of acceptable work clothes, and wonders how long it would take to comprehend him.

“Cecil,” he says, and he tries to say it like there’s a _perfect_ in front of it.

It sounds the same as ever to him, but Cecil turns with the widest, most brilliant smile on his face, and says “yes?” and pauses.


End file.
